3-parent IVF worries overblown

Three decades ago, biologist Robert Edwards perfected a procedure called in vitro fertilization, bringing joy to millions of infertile parents who would not otherwise have been able to bear a child.

Not everyone was pleased with the progress. Leon Kass, who served as chairman of President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, argued that the risk of producing an abnormal infant was too great for IVF to be justified. When Edwards was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010, the Vatican claimed the procedure "undermined the dignity" of human beings and ran contrary to the "child's right to be conceived" through marriage.

As far as I know, no product of IVF has claimed any human rights violation. Instead, more than 3 million children have been conceived by IVF, and their risk of birth defects is no greater than when a child is produced through sexual intercourse.

Now comes another new fertility procedure, and the religious and ethical objections are strikingly similar. Aided by a media intent on sensationalizing a technology that could free children of inherited diseases, detractors of so-called "designer babies" are quick to offer dire predictions of genetically engineered superkids and a brave new world of presorted, perfect embryos.

This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration held meetings to learn more about the procedure, called mitochondrial manipulation technology. Scientists believe it could help women who carry mutations for conditions such as blindness and epilepsy by ensuring the defects would not be passed on to their children.

The technology, nicknamed "three-parent IVF," involves taking defective mitochondria from a mother's egg and replacing them with healthy mitochondria from another woman. After being fertilized by the father's sperm, the egg would be implanted in the mother.

The potential is enormous. Just like embryonic stem cell research, the medical advancement could help relieve human suffering and pain. A woman whose eggs have mitochondrial abnormalities can have miscarriages, stillborn children, or sick infants unlikely to live past childhood.

So far, the procedure has been performed successfully in monkeys, and some scientists believe that there haven't been enough animal trials to proceed with human trials. That's a legitimate concern, and the FDA's job is to determine safety issues and not ethical ones.

In the meantime, though, let's try to refrain from knee-jerk, worst-case-scenario dread of something new. And let's ignore the slippery-slope hype offered by news anchors such as CNN's Ashley Banfield, who Wednesday wondered whether "Frankenbabies" would soon populate the planet and custody issues would clog the courts.

"I don't think we should be motivated by a fear of the unknown," Susan Solomon, chief executive of the New York Stem Cell Foundation, told The New York Times. "There are no designer babies here. We are trying to stop a horrible, horrible disease."

But that noble goal won't stop religious-based objections about how God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Eve and Eve. It won't stop those who claim that humans shouldn't play God, even though that same argument was raised after the first human kidney transplant in 1954.

There's a big difference between technology that could reduce birth defects, and genetic engineering intended to create beautiful blue-eyed little brainiacs. And there's a big difference between safety and sophistry.

As we ponder the potential and drawbacks of yet another medical breakthrough, it makes no sense to throw out the baby with the holy water.